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Ant writes "MSNBC reports that to help make up for sleep lost during marathon night flights, migratory birds take hundreds of powernaps during the day, each lasting only a few seconds, a new study suggests.
Every autumn, Swainson's thrushes fly up to 3,000 miles from their breeding grounds in northern Canada and Alaska to winter in Central and South America. Come spring, the birds make the long trek back. The birds fly mostly at night and often for long hours at a time, leaving little time for sleep."

"I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah."So neh

1. Invent JoltCola for birds2. Create a NGO for the support of migratory birts that lack funds for their basic needs, and make everyone feel bad that they wouldn't spare a dime for the poor birds.3. Profit!

Albatross (and related species) spend virtually their whole lives at sea, returning to land only to breed. They fish for food, but can't sleep on the sea surface because they'd get caught by preditors (some shark and whale species, sealions, etc). Their only opportunity for sleep is whilst they're flying - so they nap for a few seconds whilst they're gliding.

If you ever actually see an albatross at sea, you will know this is complete bullocks. An albatross take off is a drawn out and complicated affair with much beating of wings and windwilling of the legs. There is absolutely no way an albatross sitting on the surface could react fast enough to a predator to make an escape by getting airborne.

"I think what's interesting about our findings is that even animals that should be highly adapted to sleep loss cannot go on indefinitely," Fuchs said. "That a need for sleep cannot be eliminated even in these species underscores the importance of sleep for many, if not all, animals."

I hope I'm not the one to break this to my boss...he might even try to disprove him.

Maybe the birds were getting those drowsy sessions and 'power naps' BECAUSE they were caged and being subjected to go through utterly boring and long observation periods when they would rather be flying over the ocean somewhere. Or they just closed their eyes every few minutes to curse the researchers to hell for caging them in the first place.

But seriously, studies of this kind tend to lose credibility when they start predicting the free behaviour of species while testing them under captive conditions. Going by this logic, I can say that lions in jungle start rattling the nearest metal bars or objects they can find when they feel hungry because I observed this behaviour in a bunch of lions in the nearest zoo. I know its stretching the point a bit, and that 'some' behaviour show consistence irrespective of the state of the subject animal/bird, BUT trying to deduce migratory behaviour (out of all things) from a bunch of observational data collected from birds in cages is stretching it too far IMHO.

Going by this logic, I can say that lions in jungle start rattling the nearest metal bars or objects they can find when they feel hungry because I observed this behaviour in a bunch of lions in the nearest zoo.

You're obviously not a real scientist. A real scientist would have let the lions out of the cage before making any observations.

A real scientist would have let the lions out of the cage before making any observations.

Exactly. Not only out of the cage but in a sufficiently open and 'jungle-like' wild & natural environment before even trying to observe their natural behaviour. Now do you understand what I was trying to say or do you want me to go all medieval on your ass !

First of all, experiments I've read about have been done on birds that are flying, hence no cage.

More importantly, though, although you must accept the inevitability of sleep, nonetheless you assume that sleep is a behavior and that behavior can be affected by a cage. Well, the view that sleep is behavior has no scientific basis, in spite of the fact that we (as do other animals) have some control over when we sleep, which is, well, totally beside the point. The fact remains that we, and all animals, MUST sleep and we cannot change that. If we don't sleep, our immune and nervous systems shut down and we die. This is true of all animals.

The latest science indicates beyond any doubt that sleep has nothing to do with behavior but is, rather, a metabolic state (anabolism) which is, of course, cell-based and which, therefore, cannot be affected by putting a bird in a cage or by attaching a neuro-transmitter to a flying bird.

Studies of this kind, therefore, do NOT lose credibility because it is not behavior which is being tested, but rather it is what is being tested is a simple measurement of how the catabolic - anabolic (awake - asleep) balance is maintained in birds, in particular.

It's too bad everybody seems to think that either this is just a humorous article or that they aren't interested enough in understanding what sleep is to spend a few minutes either thinking about what sleep really is, or reading about it. Sleep is important enough that if you try to do without it you will soon be rendered useless and die. Understanding sleep can make your life better. Not getting good sleep makes your life hell, if it doesn't kill you. You can't alter the basic metabolism of life by deciding that you are somehow special and you can't understand sleep if you simply dismiss it as behavior.

There is no getting away from the fact that metabolism is present, by definition, in EVERY life form, and, even in single-cell life, is a balance between anabolism and catabolism. To the extent that animal life and plant life have a common source, and therefore have common metabolic fundamentals (at the most fundamental level) then the question of whether plants sleep is something that can be probed only by probing what sleep actually is at the most basic level. The answer is a very definite maybe. When w

I wrote major portions of that article. The fact that metabolic states are even mentioned there are because of the interaction I had with others there. Sleep cannot be properly understood as a phenonmenon of behavior. Sleep is generic to every living cell, including, of course, brain cells. Brain cells need to repair and to grow in a way that's different, however, from other types of cells. The brain is an instrument of survival or any 'higher' organism but that doesn't exempt its cells from the requir

Yep, I've done this once while driving (at 1 o'clock in the night). My eyes were closing on their own will, so I decided to keep them open. And with their open, a blank out of several seconds came - I've seen nothing for several seconds, with the eyes wide open.
I was scared, so I've stopped, moved around, waited some time and started again.

From TFA: "The thrushes also mixed up their shut-eye sessions with two other forms of sleep. In one, called unilateral eye closure, or UEC, thebirds rested one eye and one half of their brains while their other eye and brain hemisphere remained open and active, keeping them semi-alert to danger."I learned to do this back when I was doing a lot of long-distance driving. I discovered that if I closed ONE eye, it evidently let half of my brain "take a nap". After half an hour or so, I'd be as refreshed as if I

How is this different from when you keep nodding your head and waking up when you're very, very tired but doing something critical/dangerous? Hasn't everyone, to their horror, experienced this when driving? Or when you're in a lecture, your head drops, and you jerk awake with an embarrassing snorting noise?

I wouldn't consider this to be an impressive evolved behaviour, so much as just what happens when a bird in flight is pushing itself to its limits of endurance. There just aren't many animals other than humans and avians that ever find themselves having to maintain such prolonged alertness to survive, so this is seen as a phenomenon. Try keeping squirrels on a wire over a pit of spikes or something, and you'll probably observe the same behaviour.

...is that birds are on a constant exercise-regiment while the trend with humans is that they become more and more sedentary, behind their PCs, xboxes, or otherwise. I'm just saying this because some "productivity-gurus" may draw the conclusion that we should follow birds' examples. If we ditched our cars and started running everywhere, on the other hand... zzz

Digg featured the same story just the other day. It was on another website, but presented the same facts.
But, as opposed to Slashdot, they ran the article under the headline "Most flirtatious avatar [digg.com]". Somehow, I find that funny.

FTA, these swallows sleep for "9 seconds on average".If one stops flying completely for 9 seconds, the approximate distance it would fall is s = ut + 1/2at**2 [wikipedia.org]... 0+1/2*32*9*9 feet... 1296 feet.
But the barn swallow typically migrates within within 100 feet of the ground [nwf.org].So how do they avoid crashing?

"In migration along the coast, the Swainson's Thrush has been reported from sea level to about 800m [2624 feet] [royalbcmuseum.bc.ca] elevation." So they seems to be flying dangerously low if they do stop flying while sleeping, but not impossibly low. I wonder how many do crash?

But the barn swallow typically migrates within within 100 feet of the ground.

Even more impressive is the behavior of the Wandering Albatross which can fly for days at a time within a wingspan of ocean waves (albeit their wingspan is about 10 feet). They can do this even during a full gale.

So how do they avoid crashing?

They soar. Wings generate lift just because they're there and under the right conditions a bird might well increase its altitude while napping.

As a wave moves through the air, or air moves over a hill, it compresses and rises. Thus a sleeping bird may find itself safely carried over variations in surface hight without having to do a thing. It's called "slope soaring."

Not only that, but flying that close to the ocean, their wings create a "ground effect" (the same effect that allowed the Spruce Goose to lift off, but not to actually fly). I suspect all of these combine to allow the albatross to travel large distances without having to flap its wings... Waves provide energy to create a pressure differential, and the ground effect maximizes its usefulness to the albatross. Very cool stuff.

The best answer, as far as science has so far been able to ascertain, is at least two-fold. First, only half of the bird's brain is 'sleeping' (repairing itself, growing). Second, the muscles that maintain flight continue to respond even when asleep the same way that the muscles that maintain breathing respond even when asleep.

The opening of the article states that the birds fly at night, which leaves little time for sleep.Sure, if you discount the other half of the day.

I have to agree with the other commenters who pointed out that this is a good example of how watching a bird take naps in a cage may not be the best kind of science. For all we know, the birds in the wild are enjoying a hearty day's sleep, completely undisturbed by pesky lab techs trying to peer into their cage and see what they're doing. You keep looking at me

In the article it states: "Some scientists speculate that some birds might even be able to catch up on some forms of sleep while in flight, but this idea has yet to be fully tested.".

The article is not even about sleeping while flying, they are talking entirely of the bird's sleep states during the daytime (and then the birds would fly at night). But, what do I expect? This is/. after all where nobody reads the article and makes hilarious comments anyway.

Its remarkable our nervous system shares several properties with bird, since the split was 200 million years ago. By evolutionary standars humans are practically cousins with mice, perhaps splitting only 60 million years ago.
Despite this, theres evidence some birds can processes some symbols, and perform simple counting. They dont seem to have the emotional range of mammals.

Dolphins have to be conscious to breath. This means that they cannot go into a full deep sleep, because then they would suffocate. Dolphins have "solved" that by letting one half of their brain sleep at a time. This has been determined by doing EEG studies on dolphins. Dolphins sleep about 8 hours day in this fashion.

Wrong Question. You should ask "What is the purpose of waking up". Once you understand why we wake up, to find nutrition, to ingest it, to expel waste and to procreate, activities which are all catabolic, then you can go on to accept the need for metabolic balance that anabolism (a.k.a. sleep) provides. First you do one, then you do the other, etc., throughout your entire life. When you fail to find nutrition, or to ingest it, or to expel waste, or to adequately repair or grow your body, then you die.

The cost of not sleeping adequately, of not allowing your body to repair, to grow, is devasting across the human race just as any disease is. Not sleeping well can ruin your life. Spend a few minutes studying phenomena such as sleep apnea and you'll hopefully gain an appreciation for the cost that people pay for suffering from this, largely because medical professionals are not taught the fundamentals of maintaining good health, concepts such as sleep, nutrition, diet, attitude. Look around you and you'l

I've noticed that there is a direct correlation between [sliding scale of bipolar/OCD/panic disorder all the way out to schizophrenia] and a tendency to stay up all night. Up-all-night sleep-late patterns, and psych issues, tend to reinforce one another.But normalizing the sleep cycle can mitigate the depression aspects. Go to bed at a reasonable hour and get up with the sun, and you'll feel better and be more productive over the long haul -- even if you have some other problem. And try to get three full sl

You're right. This correlation has been established, as have a whole host of other such correlations between sleep and health.Sometimes a very ill patient is deliberately put into a coma for the fact that it is a deep-healing state. A fetus sleeps nearly all the time because sleep is the growth state, and because it has no need to be awake, not to find food, not to have to ingest it, not to expel it and certainly not to procreate. Same situation with animals that are born from eggs.

While back a friend with chronic depression calls me raving about how good he'd been feeling all week. Seems he'd gotten worn out the week before and had therefore gone to bed at a decent hour, and got up by 10am (four hours before his usual). D'oh....Interesting about use of coma for healing sleep.[pro dog trainer hat] You can see how sleep is *required* in puppies too -- during rapid-growth phases, they sleep 20 to 22 hours a day, and will often fall asleep in the middle of doing something. They're also a